How F1 Fans Followed Races Without the Internet

Try to picture it. It is Sunday afternoon in 1988. Ayrton Senna has just driven the qualifying lap of his life around the streets of Monaco, one and a half seconds faster than the driver in second place. But you do not know that. Because there is no live timing on your phone. No onboard camera on your tablet. You have Teletext. And, if you are lucky, NOS broadcasts a twenty-minute highlights programme somewhere between the other sports coverage. For years, Formula 1 was a sport you followed with delay, patience and a healthy dose of imagination.

Teletext, Newspapers and Autosport Magazines

For an entire generation of fans, Teletext page 604 was the sacred source. After a race, you refreshed that page until your fingers hurt, waiting for the result, which sometimes appeared only an hour after the finish. No lap times. No sector data. No pit-stop analysis. Just a list of names with a number next to each one. And if you wanted to know more, you had to wait. For Monday morning’s newspaper, for the autosport magazine that landed on the doormat on Thursday, or for a radio programme that might mention something about it.

Autosport Magazine, Formule 1 Magazine and later F1 Racing were, for many fans, the only window into the world behind the scenes. Interviews with drivers, technical analysis, photographs of cars you would otherwise never see in such detail. Those magazines were not simply read and thrown away. They were kept, stacked and sometimes preserved for years. Because information was scarce, and scarcity made it valuable.

The Era of Lauda, Prost and Senna

In the 1970s and 1980s, Formula 1 was a distant world for the average Dutch fan. Niki Lauda was almost fatally injured at the Nürburgring in 1976, but many fans only heard about it the following day through the newspaper. The rivalry between Prost and Senna in the late 1980s and early 1990s remains one of the greatest in the history of the sport, but it was followed through fragmented television footage and written reports. You saw the highlights, not the context. The tension of an entire race weekend had to be reconstructed from limited information.

And there was something special about that. The sport felt more mysterious. Drivers were not social media personalities you followed every day. They were figures you saw on television a few times a month and read about in magazines and newspapers. Schumacher in the 1990s was the first driver to truly break through to the wider public, but even then, the flow of information was limited compared with what we are used to today.

Television as the Only Window

The television broadcast was the highlight of the week. In the Netherlands, many fans depended for years on broadcasts and highlights through NOS Studio Sport, before commercial channels and later streaming services made the sport far more widely available. The commentator was your guide. He told you what you could not see, added information he received through the international feed, and tried to convey the tension of something taking place, sometimes, thousands of miles away. If the broadcast suffered technical problems, or if coverage switched to another programme, you missed part of the race. And that part did not come back. There was no replay on YouTube, no clip on X, no livestream to rewind.

From Schumacher to Verstappen: Everything Changed

Where Formula 1 fans once depended on television, newspapers and autosport magazines, many followers today watch every practice session, qualifying session and race live across several screens at once. Almost every part of a race weekend is now instantly available: live timing, onboard cameras, team radio, analysis, statistics and even market information around Formula 1 betting. For fans from the era of Lauda, Prost and Senna, it is a completely different world. The Verstappen generation knows nothing else: live timing on a phone, onboard cameras on a tablet, team radio through an app, and after the race, a constant stream of analysis on YouTube, podcasts and social media. The entire race is within reach, always and everywhere.

The Charm of Not Knowing Everything

And yet many older fans still look back fondly on the days when not everything was instantly available. The tension of waiting for a result. The ritual of opening an autosport magazine on Thursday morning. The feeling that you were experiencing something special when you could watch a full race live on television. That charm has not disappeared, but it has changed. Formula 1 is more accessible than ever, and that is a good thing. But for those who discovered the sport through Teletext and newspaper reports, that sense of discovery will always feel different from scrolling through a live feed. Both are valuable. Both are Formula 1. But they are not the same.

About the author

Leopold

Leopold Pleijsier founded F1-Fansite.com in 2001 and has followed Formula 1 since the early 1980s. He writes about daily F1 news, race weekends, drivers and the sport’s history.

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